Stuck
by Eradicated Illness
Summary: When Wufei gets stuck between a rock and a hard place, he has to figure out which one will break first and if it will destroy him with it.


[A/N]: Yes, yet another fanfic.  I'm trying to work on the others.  At least the Untitled 1x2x5 looks to be completed.  And also: yay to celebrating new pairings!  Take a dive and try something new today!  Also, please note that this first chapter is the dispassionate reflective past narrative, which, according to Vuli, is still very angsty (though I don't believe it), even though it's not supposed to be.

**Prologue**

Sharing safehouses during the war had always been difficult for us.  Deciding who would share rooms or even beds as the occasion demanded, was awkward, uncomfortable, and sometimes embarrassing.  We all guarded our privacy with our lives.  In whatever short moments we had to ourselves, we mourned for our childhoods, remembered our pasts, and honored our ghosts.  It was all we had left and for most of us, all we ever had.  Those times were not easily shared and we were unwilling to take another person's burden on our shoulders.  Our individual loads were already too heavy.

I myself would often claim a room without a bed, and curl up on a couch or on the floor with a few blankets.  Or if the hangar was close enough, I'd bunk in Nataku's cockpit.  The command chair, while hard and unforgiving, comforted my spirit in place of a mother's hand.  Nataku had always been there for me.  She asked no questions and accepted me unconditionally.  She was the anchor in the turmoil of my life.  She had seen me through training, my engagement and marriage, and the destruction of the only home I had ever known.  The most at peace I ever was was curled in her heart and snuggly bundled in a blanket.

As we fought and lived, bonds grew between us and we became quite close.  I found myself asking my ancestors to look after the others as they left for missions, and hoping someone was praying for my return.  We were becoming quite the little happy family, a little haven of peace that we all desperately needed.

It was a few months later when Winner and Barton made their announcement.

They were more than friends, they told us.  They were sleeping together, but more than that, they thought they were in love.  They knew they were in love.

It threw all of us for a loop.

Before we had drawn comfort from each other.  But when did that go too far?  When would it stop being about the mission, and start being about the lives of our friends?  Or for some of us, the lives of our lovers?  What if it came to sacrificing those lives?

And moreover, though less important, we were five teenaged boys in a two room safehouse at the time.  Space was cramped and we were lucky just to have a closed off bathroom with a working shower stall rather than just an outhouse out back.  The news brought to mind things we should not have been thinking about, given the circumstances with the war.  Sex mostly, but also thoughts about our orientations and relationships.  The last one most of all should never have crossed our minds.  It broke our family into something else, in my eyes at least.  It was suddenly something different, something decidedly less innocent in our pseudo-adult lives.

I think all three of us—being obviously Maxwell, Yuy, and myself—camped out in our Gundams that night, and most surprising of all, not a complaint escaped Maxwell's lips.

After that, not much happened for a while, except for missions and the occasional semi-serious injury.  Maxwell had accepted his friends' decision and although he did not approve at first, he was happy for them.  When a few months had gone by, and they had proved that they still could and would fight with the same ferocity and disregard for their lives, Yuy lessoned his criticism of their relationship and began studying them, searching for any tidbit that could make him a more efficient soldier.

It was also about this time that Maxwell and Yuy began sharing rooms more and more often, assuming that I would not mind.

In truth, I did not.  That is I did not mind being excluded.  I was solitary by nature and given a choice, I would have chosen the same arrangements, although I might have asked for the room instead of the couch.

But what continued to plague my mind was how everyone could just accept it.  It did not make sense to me how even Yuy, who claimed missions were everything, could acknowledge such social intricacies.  I did not understand.  It seemed as though they were abandoning the mission, and in effect, the war itself.

And so I spent more and more nights in Nataku's cold arms and soon stopped going to the safehouses at all.  The others questioned my motives, and I told them I wanted to be alone.  It was true after all.  When I was around them, I never had any time for myself.  Meditation had to be done behind locked doors—though those did little to aid my plight—and outdoors (which was unfavorable much of the time because of weather conditions).  However, after I left, a small part of me seemed empty.

I saw little of Maxwell, Barton, and Winner throughout the war and even then only on joint missions.  We spoke over the comm. a bit and I continually saw how, despite the war, they had found a little bit of happiness, and even though I did not understand it, I was happy for them.

The only pilot I ever really saw was Heero.  When he was alone, he would seek me out sometimes, just to have some human contact without all the niceties involved.  We enjoyed each other's company and brought out the best in each other.  It came to be that I began seeking him out when I had down-time.  When he needed a partner for a mission, I was the first to raise my hand.  I found myself starting conversations with him and finding excuses to do things together.  He didn't seem to mind.  It wasn't until I stumbled upon him and Maxwell in an embrace—and the horrid, heart-clenching pain afterwards—that the reality of their relationship hit me, and I realized I was infatuated.  It went against everything I had ever been told, about my dedication to the war effort, my morals, everything.  And so I stopped seeing him.  He was curious about that, but the war came first in his mind.

The climax of the war came and went.  I fought Treize and the bastard purposefully died on me.  I was the one who was supposed to die in that battle.  I had meant to give my all and then die peacefully.  But it didn't work, and I was left floundering.

In the new peace, I was disoriented.  I was infatuated with a man who was already spoken for—seemingly for life—and disgusted with the fact that I let Treize let me kill him.

During the second Eve War, while I battled Heero in space, I thought that if only I could get through to him, prove to him of what I was saying, that maybe we could reconnect, even after I estranged us a year before.  But unfortunately I had been wrong in my ideals, and afterwards, I realized my justice had been warped so far as to be unrecognizable.  After the war, not being able to straighten out my own head, I wandered around for a while until Une offered me a position at Preventers, the new world police force.  But I was too depressed, too unstable, too dishonorable.  I refused before running off to China.

I ran all over the large country before I found myself on a rock by a small waterfall somewhere in the middle.  And somehow my sword found its way into my stomach.  Three times.  In deep horizontal slashes.  Seppuku* was an honorable death.

But I did not die.  Rather I was found, minutes after the steel slid from my fingers to clatter on the rocks, by an enterprising young botanist just out of college.  He was studying the local flora, checking for endangered species and looking for undiscovered ones.  He called an ambulance from his cell and within minutes I was airlifted to a hospital where I woke up hours later after intensive surgery.  Technology could do anything short of bringing back the dead.

From fingerprinting, they had quickly discovered my identity, but after a quick call to Une—with the excuse 'I fell on a rock!'—the hospital staff erased me from their records.  It would not do to have four angry, worried Gundam pilots storming my room the next day.  I could only hope they hadn't found me already.

I spent two months recovering in the hospital.  I had completely mutilated my small and large intestines, pancreas, gall bladder, and even managed to slice into my stomach.  My slashes had been neat, if not clean, and only the last one meandered off a little on the end as I had grown groggy with blood loss and pain.  I spent two months in that hospital, mulling over my thoughts and actions and growing more ashamed by the day.  I came to the conclusion that this was not my first suicide attempt.  No, the first was my last battle with Treize.  I had meant to die.  I had meant to die with the war, so I would not have to deal with the aftermath: learning to live in peace, finding a job when I had no formal high school education, having to live among civilians and fearing that my instincts might get one of them killed.  There were more things on that list, things I were afraid of.  But the most fearful was Heero.  He would have discovered my feelings and what would he have done then?  Even if he had taken them kindly—though it seemed impossible with his nature—I would not wish to disturb his relationship with Maxwell.  As it was, there was nothing for me without the war and so I tried to die with it.  That failed miserably and led me to China and seppuku.  By all means and definitions, I was officially a coward.

Fortunately I suppose, I wasn't left alone for long periods of time in the hospital.  Tom visited as often as he could.  He was friendly, open, provocative, and steady.  Though I resisted his efforts at first, we became tentative friends.  By the time I was released from the hospital, he offered to let me stay with him—if I didn't mind a run-down rickety wooden shack with no running water or electricity.  He was due to stay in the area for another four months yet, and the general proximity would allow me to keep up with my bi-weekly checkups at the hospital.  Most of my scarring was on the inside, which was why the doctors kept me in the hospital for so long.  In the early days, one wrong twist could rip something open again.  And even after I was released, my actions were limited for a long time.

I helped Tom with his studies, in effect killing three birds with one stone.

One, I managed to feel less guilty about imposing on him, despite the invitation.  I was rather dependent upon him in those first few months.  I needed him for most everything at the beginning, from driving me to and from the hospital to helping me with the exercises I was assigned by my physical therapist.  Granted I wasn't too much help at first, besides a second opinion on colors and states of health, but as I regained strength and mobility, I was able to do a lot of the heavy work which eased his aching muscles (I learned what a damn hard thing it was to lift a fallen branch out of the way, study the fungi underneath, and take notes at the same time.  Needless to say, it made for some awkward positions).

Two, it allowed me to stay hidden from the world, lost in the Chinese jungle.  Thom had very little traceable technology.  Sure he had his microscopes and meters and other botany-related equipment, but none of it was connected to the internet and it was all battery-run.  The only risqué article in his possession was his cell phone, which I never used anyway (who would I call?).  No one could find me if I didn't want them to.  
  
And three, it helped me adjust.  To everything.  Working simply with Thom put everything in the back of my head where I didn't have to deal with it.  After months, I found myself entering normal society without even realizing it—the first incident I fully remember was when I had been making small talk (_small talk!_) with the cashier at a convenience store while Thom picked up lunch meats and bread.  Casual civilian society suddenly did not seem quite so daunting.  
  
The time I spent with Thom was very peaceful.  I enjoyed the work immensely because it took my mind off of things I did not want to think about.  It also took me back to my scholarly roots, sitting in my field of flowers (_Chang Wufei_ in a field of flowers, Maxwell would laugh) with a book or two or half a dozen.  
  


But sometimes, as I bent bamboo back for Thom, I'd think of how Heero could bend steel just as easily.  And I couldn't help but wonder if he ever thought about me.


End file.
